Published: New York, 1990 You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to understand why students might need a break from the rigors of an MIT education. For many decades, the Libraries’ collection of detective fiction has served to provide that escape. Before the Internet, before there was a television in every dorm room, students here at “Tech” would curl up with some lighthearted prose for the occasional respite. The seventh installment in Sue Grafton’s “alphabet series” is a contribution to this long Institute tradition. It’s no secret that today’s student is more likely to turn to the Web rather than […]

Published: New York, 1989 When people think about women’s liberation today, the images that come to mind are often of young women in the 1970s burning their bras. Those willing to probe a bit more deeply into the past might remember consciousness-raising groups, or demonstrations held by women fighting for recognition and for equal rights. The publications most often associated with the women’s movement are Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, the Boston Women’s Health Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves and possibly Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. But the latter is a product neither of the Seventies […]

Live performance recorded: Cambridge, Mass., May 6, 1970 On the morning of May 4, 1970, four unarmed students were shot dead during student protests at Kent State University. That afternoon, over 1500 members of the MIT community, including over 200 faculty, flooded into the Kresge Auditorium and voted overwhelmingly to strike “in solidarity with the national university strike,” according to the May 5 edition of The Tech. The meeting’s consensus “emphasized the desirability of a broadly-based action including all faculty and administrators willing to work against the Vietnam War.” Classes were suspended, faculty was urged to be flexible about delayed […]

Published: New York, 1969 Before the American Indian Movement temporarily seized the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972, and before its occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, Vine Deloria cast the Native American struggle into the public consciousness with what remains one of the most esteemed nonfiction books in the American Indian corpus. Deftly blending humor, social critique, and call for reform, Deloria challenges Native American stereotypes as well as agencies’ attempts to “help” the natives. What’s more, he’s not afraid to call authorities out on their own hypocrisies. “Some years back,” Deloria writes, Richard Nixon warned the American people […]

Published: New York, 1968 (original version premiered: Cambridge, Mass., 1955) “Freedom is a noble thing!” That is the first line intoned by the chorus in the finale of Aaron Copland’s Canticle of Freedom, a piece commissioned by MIT for the 1955 dedication of Kresge Auditorium and the MIT Chapel. Famed modernist architect Eero Saarinen designed both the domed, 1200-seat auditorium and the cylindrical, windowless chapel that sits near it within a concrete moat. On May 8, 1955, James R. Killian Jr., president of the Institute, accepted the buildings. During the festivities, Copland’s Canticle was conducted by Klaus Liepmann, the founder […]

Published: New York, 1967 Paul Samuelson’s Economics is the very definition of the “standard text in its field”: according to the New York Times, it was the nation’s best-selling textbook for 30 years. Originally published in 1948, it’s still selling briskly more than 60 years later. Generations of budding economists and countless other college graduates have learned the basics of supply and demand, interest and capital, market structure, and just about everything else concerning economics, from Samuelson. It’s been said that he “created” modern economics; that his biggest contribution to the field was, in essence, changing the very way in […]

Published: New York, 1966 Today, if you please, we’d like to survey American manners. Gerald Carson’s The Polite Americans starts out in the rigid confines of Colonial Massachusetts, where propriety dictated that the populace was allowed to wear “Gold or Silver lace, or Buttons, or Points at [their] knees” only if they possessed “a capital of over £200.” A later chapter is devoted entirely to dueling, in which opponents may assault one another with deadly weapons, but must do so with the utmost politeness. Carson describes the sort of challenge to one’s honor that might necessitate a duel. One example […]

Published: St. Louis and Boston, 1965 By the time this report was prepared for the Massachusetts Department of Public Works in 1965, the idea of building an expressway from Roxbury to Somerville had been around for more than a decade and a half. The initial plan for I-695 was proposed in 1948. The route would have begun in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, cut through Brookline, bisected Cambridge right in MIT’s backyard, and reconnected with I-93 in Somerville. Needless to say, this 7.3-mile loop would have effected a drastic change on the urban landscape. As crews began clearing the right-of-way in the […]

Published: Pisa, 1964 MIT’s rare book collections contain many treasures. One of our prized possessions is the 1638 Discorsi e Dimostrazioni Matematiche, Intorno à Due Nuove Scienze, or Discourses on the Two New Sciences. This is the last book published by Galileo during his lifetime, and a landmark of scientific literature. Another of Galileo’s groundbreaking works is his Sidereus Nuncius, often referred to in English as The Starry Messenger. The Libraries’ copy of this title isn’t a genuine first edition of Galileo’s 1610 publication; rather, it’s a beautifully produced, numbered, limited-edition facsimile, printed in Pisa in 1964. In the Sidereus […]

Published: New York, 1963 Welding of metals is a process crucial to technology and industry, but certain metals defy conventional welding. Explosive welding was developed as a solution to this problem, allowing such welded pairings as titanium with steel, and copper with steel. The research partnership of Rinehart and Pearson was among the first to develop this now widely-applied technology. Rinehart and Pearson met while both were working at the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake, California. As they state in the preface to Explosive Working of Metals, each author wrote the section of the book with which he […]